The Numbers Don’t Lie: Self-Driving Cars Are Getting Good

It’s report card time for the automakers and Silicon Valley denizens studying the tricky problem of making cars drive themselves, and everyone is passing. The California DMV just released its annual slate of “disengagement reports,” documents provided by the 11 companies that received state permits to test autonomous vehicles by the end of 2015. The results, summarized […]

Google Accuses Uber of Stealing Its Self-Driving Car Tech

Until today, the race to build a self-driving car seemed to hinge on who had the best technology. Now it’s become a case of full-blown corporate intrigue. Alphabet’s self-driving startup, Waymo, is suing Uber, accusing the ridesharing giant of stealing critical autonomous driving technology. If the suit goes to trial, Apple’s legal battle with Samsung […]

How Baltimore Became America’s Laboratory for Spy Tech

If you live in Baltimore, you may have the feeling that you’re being watched. You are. Baltimore Police track your cellphone use without a warrant. They secretly film the entire city from the air. And as concerns about the uses and privacy implications of that next-generation surveillance tech have mounted, these domestic spying scandals also raise […]

Universities Must Help Educate Woefully Uninformed Lawmakers

Two decades ago, Congress picked a particularly bad way to save money. Lawmakers, in a frenzy of federal budget-cutting, decided to fire their own dedicated corps of advisers on science and technology. The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)—a group of about 140 primarily PhD experts who educated members of Congress and performed deep-dive studies to […]

While You Were Offline: Maybe Joseph Fiennes Playing Michael Jackson Wasn’t the Best Idea

As if to prove that this year is going to be a fun-packed thrill ride, the second week of 2017 has brought us closer to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the announcement of the Nintendo Switch. But those are still mere appetizers to the week’s main events. What has the World Wide […]

‘Prisoners of Gravity’: Hey, TV Sci-Fi Can Have Ideas After All

Most sci-fi TV is more about action and spectacle than anything thoughtful, but one show that really did the intellectual side of science fiction justice was Prisoners of Gravity, which aired on TVOntario from 1989 to 1994. On the show, host Rick Green used science fiction to explore far more serious topics. “You’re talking with people who […]

Magical, Striking Scenes From … Google Street View?

Jacqui Kenny spent a full day wandering around Saint-Louis, Senegal searching for the perfect photo. She was about to give up when she rounded a corner and spotted it: Two women in head scarves walking by a mosque. The bright colors, long shadows, and symmetry were just right. Kenny pressed shift-command-3 on her keyboard and […]

Google Allo: The Super-Smart Future of Messaging Is Kind of an Idiot Sometimes

The first thing that happened when I downloaded Allo, only a few seconds after I had given Google’s new messaging app my phone number and snapped a selfie for my profile pic, is I got a cheery message from a new friend. “Hi David Pierce!” it said, in white letters on a blue bubbly background. […]

If You’re Binge-Watching ‘Broadchurch,’ You’re Doing It Wrong

In the era of prestige TV, when there are far more good shows to watch than there are hours in the day, binge-watching has become essential. Viewers have to get in their shows when they can. But a few smart programs find ways to evade the appeal of the binge-watch. If you asked Broadchurch creator […]

Swarm Hugs

Continuing our miniseries of year-end recap shows, David and Michael name their picks for the best products, apps, and gadgets across all of the major categories. Phones, computers, cars, kitchen stuff, and everything else you want to know about. We also hear from the transportation team: Alex, Aarian, and Jack, who discuss Tesla’s big year. […]

Time for Snap to Prove It’s Bigger Than Snapchat

Snap Inc. is a camera company. It’s very important to Snap Inc. that you understand it’s not a social networking app or a messaging service. It’s something else. It’s a camera company. “We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way that people live and communicate,” it says in an […]

How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder

What’s the difference between physics and biology? Take a golf ball and a cannonball and drop them off the Tower of Pisa. The laws of physics allow you to predict their trajectories pretty much as accurately as you could wish for. Quanta Magazine About Now do the same experiment again, but replace the cannonball with […]

Airbus’ A380plus Comes With Fuel-Saving Winglets and 80 More Seats

The world’s largest airliner is struggling to stay aloft. Financially, that is. Airlines, it turns out, prefer the fuel efficiency of smaller planes like the Boeing 777 to the pack-em-in capacity of the Airbus A380. As a result, Airbus hasn’t scored any new orders for an A380 in more than a year. Its big plan […]

Comic-Con 2017: Black Panther, Joss Whedon and Everything Else We Want to See

With all due respect to the masochists in the Tour de France, the 2,200-mile bike race is not the most grueling endurance event July has to offer. That honor falls to Comic-Con International: San Diego, in which 150,000 pop-culture obsessives flock to a beautiful beach town—and then head straight inside for four days of panels, […]

Amazon Bursts Blue Apron’s Bubble, as the Market Checks Tech’s Hype

The tech bubble that 2016 threatened didn’t burst, prompting observers to heave a sigh of relief. But it turns out, there was a bubble, it was just growing slightly out of sight, in private start-up funding. Now, the public market is showing just where it exists. Exemplifying this trend are two of the once hottest […]

Baby Driver Brings Your Badass Playlist Fantasies to Life

Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver begins the way most capers end: three goons pulling off a bank heist, then their getaway driver leaving the cops in his rearview. Unlike most capers, though, the escapade goes down to the pulse-pounding strains of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms.” It’s a whiplash-inducing rush that lays more than a […]

Oracle Just Bought Dyn, the Company That Brought Down the Internet

Last month, the entire internet went down for a few hours. At least that’s what one of the biggest denial-of-service attacks in recent memory felt like to a lot of people. Sites from Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit to The New York Times and, yes, even WIRED went dark. The massive outage was the result of […]

Meet a Young Vape God and the Week’s Other Characters

Editor’s note: We’re proud to bring NextDraft—the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web—to WIRED.com. Every Friday you’ll get a roundup of the week’s most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. So dig in and geek out. Run for Your Life Stop what you’re doing. Drop everything. And […]

While You Were Offline: James Comey Knows How to Make an Entrance

Hey, buddy. How you doin’? Are your social feeds holding up? Last week was a crazy one. Between Wonder Woman thinkpieces and the strangest political spectacle in some time, life came at everyone a little faster than normal over the last few days. So if some things slipped through your particular mental cracks that’s totally […]